Cookies are small text files downloaded to your computer each time you visit a website. When you return to websites, or you visit websites using the same cookies, they accept these cookies and therefore your computer or mobile device.

Editorial

A MESSAGE FROM GIANCARLO PERINI, PUBLISHER.

Car designers around the world, please help us to raise this baby. Make it yours.

Yes, you can!

Through the past five years I have been running a blog dedicated to car design with an experimental approach. I was eager to establish a bridge with the design community and to gain experience on the web.

Now, time has come for a new project with broader goals, focuses and reach.

The goal is to establish a very lively «Café littéraire» where professional designers, design educators and students, car and design enthusiasts meet, show their ideas, discuss design matters and trends, contribute with their own reports and stories to the development of a modern design culture, with past experiences and inputs from different cultures.

Walter De Silva keeps expanding his horizon on design and challenges himself again and again.

For the “Feeding New Ideas for the City” within the frame of the Fuorisalone 2014, De Silva has conceived an installation exploiting 2d visual communication and a solid 3D industrial sculpture confirming Audi’s care for quality, precision, image and brand.

The audio-visual is joyful and yet communicate the company achievements in every area, from design to engineering and manufacturing. The sculpture shows the mating of a sophisticated aluminium frame with a number of carbon fibre component connected to the frame. Which chassis frame it is may not be relevant at all here but automotive experts may guess this is a preview of the Audi Q4 concept the company will be showing shortly at the Beijing Motor Show.

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars today revealed that its Bespoke business has become more successful than ever with content on its range of super-luxury cars reaching new heights in 2013. Almost 95% of Rolls-Royce cars purchased last year were personalised by their owners, reinforcing the claim that Rolls-Royce is the go-to luxury carmaker for the connoisseur who demands the best in individualisation.

Global Bespoke take-up increased in 2013 as customers for Phantom and Ghost commissioned higher levels of Bespoke content on their cars. In its first year of availability, 90% of Wraiths were purchased with Bespoke options specified by their owners.

Reinventing itself is the DNA of the brand, says Frédéric Banzet, general manager of the Citroën brand. «It is a choice; it is a must; it is a strategy».

Citroën is reinventing itself since it adopted the strategy of doubling its character and appeal, by being bipartisan. Democratic and Republican. It is investing in two production lines which have different personalities, different mission and different style; and it is taking a new global start by betting on two product profiling. The C and DS lines.

Don’t be mistaken; despite its avant-guardistic design the new Citroen C-Cactus is not just another pretty concept cars built to be part of the show in Frankfurt. That was true with the first Cactus, bowed here six years ago. The 2013 Citroen C-Cactus is called a concept simply because it is not on sale yet and it has much bigger wheels that it has been designed for, some special details and a plush upholstery inside. Otherwise this is the production car, only tuned-up and beautified for the show.